Dying Fall

by Judith Cutler

  I’d rather it had been Shahida exclaiming over it, the narrow black dress and its heavily beaded bolero top, but it was nice to have Roy and Sarah enjoying it. That’s one thing I missed in my newly solitary life – someone to share those moments of excitement. That’s why I couldn’t at bottom understand my dislike of Tina – she was happy to share, and very vocally too, when I waited for Stobbard to collect me. I’d spent a least five minutes making up my face, so I was a little disappointed to hear the faint note of surprise in Stobbard’s voice when he at last arrived – too late for a drink: ‘Hey, Sophie, you look really good.’

  I looked as good as I was ever likely to: I suppose my ego would have liked a little effusiveness.

  Stobbard, of course, looked entirely delectable. His dinner jacket had presumably been tailored for him, and even his shirt didn’t seem to have come from the ranks at Marks. He was wearing some of the cologne that had so attracted me after the inquest on George.

  I would be too embarrassed to give a blow-by-blow account of the evening. There I was, sitting next to the most desirable man in the whole auditorium, and all I could do was desire him. I did try to follow the rather dotty plot, and I should have admired the grace and athleticism of the dancers. But I was disconcerted by the noise they made. I’d only ever seen the odd Nutcracker on Christmas TV, when I was too gorged to switch channels. TV ballet has mikes to catch the music but none to pick up heavy landings. It stands to reason that even a ten-stone man leaping magnificently across the stage will make some noise, but I was illogically disappointed.

  And Stobbard was there, close enough for me to feel the warmth of his arm on the rest between us. Instead of resenting his claim on it, I left my hands demurely in my lap. But I was willing Stobbard to reach across to take one.

  If I looked down and to the right I could see the length of his thigh; if he crossed his ankles the other way, inevitably his foot would find mine, just waiting to be found. I don’t think he shifted position for the whole of the first half.

  At the interval, he took my elbow in a terribly impersonal way and guided me to the bar. I was so subdued I didn’t even carp at the notice: INVITED GUESTS ONLY.

  Chris would probably have given me a provocative nudge just to set me off in my condemnations of a tautology I particularly loathed. Stobbard, however, was more concerned with acquiring our champagne and smiling very public smiles. I smiled too. He was, after all, on behalf of what he would no doubt call the Midshires Symphony, an ambassador, out to cultivate the captains of Birmingham’s little remaining industry whose sleekness threatened to overpower his. None of them seemed to have anything discriminating to say about the performance, either, though presumably their lack of concentration stemmed from another cause than mine. They were in no hurry to return to their places, and would no doubt expect to be waited for. George had once fulminated about an out-of-town gig when the sponsors had not thought it necessary to enter the auditorium until the orchestra, the leader, the conductor and the soloist were all on stage.

  Another hour of the ballet to look forward to: people being bored, people leaping around the stage, people feeling randy. OK, me feeling randy. I still had no encouragement from Stobbard. I assumed it must be professional interest that was keeping him going, but a covert glance at his face suggested he might be asleep. And there was no George to tell.

  Suddenly, in the midst of all the braying voices and champagne, he turned to me. ‘Jesus, who are all these goddamn people?’ he demanded, taking my arm in quite a different way. I’d been flirting with a man old enough to be my father and rich enough to buy the college a minivan if I’d worked just a little bit harder. I’d been describing the antics involved in getting football and hockey teams across to other colleges on buses that demanded the correct change. The Principal, I was saying, seemed to think we should use Barclaycard.

  ‘But,’ said my elderly flirt slowly, ‘buses don’t accept Barclaycard.’

  ‘Perhaps we should try American Express.’

  At this point Stobbard appropriated me, the young stag defeating the old without even a clash of antlers. Now every time he took a step he contrived to brush my breast. My nipples stood to attention; my vagina was salivating so much I could hardly walk. He slung my coat across my shoulders: no doubt he considered the chic rather than the practicalities of keeping warm on a frosty March night. ‘Come on, let’s get the hell out of here. I could use some jazz.’

  ‘Jazz?’

  ‘C’mon, there must be somewhere in this city where you can hear jazz?’

  I tried not to dither, tried not to notice that someone had taken our cab.

  ‘Ronnie Scott’s?’ Nice and close to the Mondiale, after all.

  ‘Something real, that’s what I want.’

  A real curry sprang to my mind. Too much champagne and too few nibbles to mop it up. But if the man wanted jazz, the man wanted jazz. ‘The Cannonball,’ I suggested at last. ‘Down Digbeth.’

  ‘Digbeth?’

  ‘We could walk. Just.’

  Foolish Sophie. In this wind? At this time of night? The pace he set might have warmed me, if only I’d been able to keep up in my silly evening pumps. We cut through the Chinese quarter to St Martin’s. At last we started down Digbeth High Street. Bugger real jazz. If only he’d been charming and gracious it might have been quite romantic. But he was neither.

  At last he must have noticed the wind, which was blinding me with tears.

  ‘OK. Let’s skip the jazz. Say, don’t they have cabs in this goddamn dump?’

  Taxis in Birmingham generally wait in ranks for you to go to them. Or you phone and they come. They don’t, like London cabs, cruise round helpfully looking for you, and in any case Digbeth at this time of night is not the safest place for taxis. Or people, for that matter.

  ‘Know the number?’

  As it happened, I did. But what was the use of a number without a phone? Any public telephone round here was bound to have been vandalised. I had reckoned without his tiny mobile phone. And at last, at long last, he discovered an excellent way of getting me warm.

  At first the warmth of the Mondiale was blissful. His suite, however, was baking. While I waited for him to use the bathroom, I hunted for a radiator control. But he emerged before I could find it. I wished he’d waited till I’d got up from my hands and knees.

  He looked at me oddly, as indeed he might, and poured the champagne that had arrived almost as we had, together with some minuscule canapés.

  ‘I like the view from here,’ he said.

  I preened. Perhaps he was a man for small breasts. But he was looking out of the window. He’d meant it all too literally.

  ‘Come and look,’ he said, gesturing with his glass.

  I stood a foot behind him.

  ‘Aw, c’mon, Sophie.’ He reached for the window catch. ‘Champagne on the balcony.’

  Suddenly I was shivering again.

  ‘You can see right across the city. The lights remind me of back home.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s vertigo. I can’t.’

  ‘But don’t you work in some tower block?’

  ‘I never look out of the window. Sorry, Stobbard. I truly can’t.’

  If I hoped he’d kiss and caress my fears from me, I was to be disappointed. He merely turned and rang irritably for more champagne.

  The arrival of a waiter bringing a fresh supply of ice and two more bottles of champagne made me feel, despite my expensive outfit, cheap. Whenever I’d slept with a man before, it had always been private. We’d both known – or at least hoped – what would take place, but no one else had. Kenji and I had bought our rough Italian wine at an off-licence and retired – to his bed, that time – and that was that. But for all his discreet and downcast eyes, I knew that the waiter knew that we did not intend to spend the rest of the evening reviewing the ballet. I retired to the loo to sit and think.

  The bathroom certainly provided food for thought – not only a bidet, a handbasin and a shower, but
also a bath big enough for two. Perched on the far edge was a particularly phallic loofah.

  Virtue and dignity, or sex? My body cast its deciding vote. It told the meeting it wished to clamp itself round Stobbard’s at the earliest opportunity.

  He had removed his jacket and tie and was coaxing the cork from the second bottle. I watched his hands, with their long, curling thumbs, making easy an operation that other people make a fuss about. When he saw me watching, he smiled, laying down the bottle, still just corked, and he turned to me. He slipped his hands on to my throat, his thumbs pushing up my chin to the right angle.

  And then he started to sneeze.

  Stripped, Stobbard was as beautiful as I’d hoped he’d be. All those wonderful muscles, and a fine clear skin. He was lying face down on the bed, as if hiding from the brief embarrassment that had made me offer him a massage. My hands explored the knots of tension, kneading them in the hope that this time he would rise to me. Down to his buttocks at last, and any moment now he’d roll over, and everything would be all right.

  Everything went to plan. He groaned with pleasure under my hands. He rolled over.

  But he didn’t have an erection.

  ‘Godamn it, I guess it’s those fucking antihistamines,’ he muttered, turning away from me.

  ‘Shall I – would you like me to help?’ I asked gently, reaching for him.

  He winced from my touch as if my hand were barbed wire.

  ‘I tell you – enough!’ He sat up on the far side of the bed, and reached for my pretty dress, his right hand bunching it so he could throw it across to me. ‘Just get the hell out of here!’

  I wouldn’t let him see me cry. I picked it up as it slithered to the floor and carried it to the bathroom.

  When I emerged he was wearing a tracksuit.

  ‘Would you mind if I called a cab?’ I asked, relieved that my voice didn’t shake.

  He passed me the phone and poured another glass of champagne.

  I called the minicab service we’d used an hour ago.

  While I waited I stared at a framed notice advertising the hotel’s secretarial service for its guests. Didn’t see it. Didn’t take it in. It was just something to focus on to stop the tears. But there was something familiar about it.

  There’d be a cab outside the foyer in five minutes.

  The net curtains washed and billowed over the carpet. He stood by the open window, breathing deeply. Timidly I moved closer. He gave me something approaching a smile and moved his arm, as if inviting me to snuggle up to him. I wanted to. God, I wanted to …

  The phone rang. My cab was waiting.

  He insisted on escorting me down. Although we had the lift to ourselves, he made no effort to get close. We chattered superficially about his concert with the MSO in Cheltenham the following evening. If only he would ask me to go along – but in any case, I was teaching Sean’s class. It was a beautiful programme, if rather long: an early Haydn symphony, Schubert’s Eighth (which sometimes appears in print as the Unfurnished), and Beethoven’s Third Symphony. I would not remind him of another popular misprint – the Erotica. Instead, and not much more tactfully, I asked him who was playing the important bassoon part in the Haydn, one of George’s favourites.

  ‘Don’t ask. Some goddamn extra. Not Jools. Don’t even think of it, I told Rossiter. Over my dead body.’

  ‘Isn’t he trying to get rid of her? As she’s so incompetent?’ I added, as he seemed to need some explanation.

  He stared at me hard, then said, sounding ineffably bored, ‘Musicians’ Union. Assholes.’

  By this time the pain in my chest was unbearable. My mouth might have been talking but it still wanted the pressure of his. Any moment I was going to cry. I felt so bloody rejected. So bloody all over. Not because I couldn’t arouse him. Everyone gets their flat spots and he must have been suffering much more than I. But if a relationship was to develop we should have talked, comforted each other. And he hadn’t cared enough.

  When Kenji had gone back to his sumo wrestlers, I was so angry I hardly had time to be hurt. But this time my heart hurt, hurt as much as my lips, and still I could hardly walk for wanting him so much.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The minicab was waiting, the driver drumming his fingers on the Montego’s steering wheel. Stobbard made no attempt to open the rear door for me. Then the driver looked up and grinned.

  ‘Hey, if it isn’t Sophie!’ he said, getting out.

  ‘Khalid! Stobbard, this is one of my ex-students, Khalid Mushtaq –’ I turned to Stobbard, smiling. I hoped he’d shake hands with Khalid, and then – why not? – kiss me good night. But he merely nodded, shoved his hands into his pockets and withdrew into the shadows.

  Maybe I could replace some of my misery with honest bad temper: how dared he cut Khalid like that? Khalid, meanwhile, had sensed the slight. And I could scarcely explain that it might have been unintentional, Stobbard still perhaps smarting after what he no doubt saw as a failure.

  ‘You OK, Sophie?’

  ‘Sure. Why don’t I sit in front so we can talk? You can start by telling me why you’re driving a cab. I thought you got a First? In Computing?’

  Khalid Mushtaq had been one of my nicest ever students, and one of the very best. At one point it looked as if TB might stop him sitting his A levels, and I’d taken work round, first to the isolation hospital and then to his home. I’d not been the only one by any means, but I suppose I’d been the most regular. And in the end, all the teamwork paid off – Khalid had passed, triumphantly.

  ‘Yes. LSE. Anyway, I thought I’d better move back up to Brum – my mother’s not too good at the moment – and I’m doing my PhD.’

  ‘What in?’

  ‘Come off it, Sophie – if I explained all night you’d be none the wiser, would you?’

  ‘Thanks, Khalid. OK, which uni?’

  ‘Brum. But the grant’s – well, I shouldn’t moan. So I do a spot of moonlighting. You still beavering away at William Murdock?’

  ‘D’you suppose the place would fall down if I built a big enough lodge?’

  ‘Have to watch it if you’re still on the fifteenth.’

  ‘I do indeed,’ I began, about to tell him my recent woes.

  He put the car into gear and started to pull into Broad Street.

  ‘Hang on! Khalid, you’ll think I’ve flipped, but could you take me a really odd way home? Yes, I’m still in Harborne, still the same place. You see, I’m afraid of being followed.’ And I was. Suddenly I felt sick with terror.

  ‘What – are you kidding me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You mean now?’

  ‘In general. And maybe now in particular.’

  ‘Ah.’ I knew that tone. I knew I could rely on him to trust me without question. ‘So we head for the city centre, not Harborne, and then do one or two clever bits. Fill me in as we go. Any idea what sort of a tail we could have?’

  ‘I’ve met a brown Datsun a couple of times.’

  ‘Well, let’s just prove –’ his speech slowed as he checked the rear-view mirror –‘that no one’s behind us now, shall we? Hold tight.’ Reaching for the handbrake with his left hand, he shifted his grip with his right until it was to the bottom left of the steering wheel. ‘OK?’

  Before I really knew what was happening, the car was pointing the other way. He accelerated hard, shooting a set of lights I trust he’d normally have stopped at, and headed not for the underpass but for the island at Five Ways. And went round it twice. Just as I hoped we were going home, he took off down Ladywood Middleway. I suppose he could have dropped me off at college – it would have been the earliest start I’d ever made. As we hurtled downhill, I gave him the barest bones of what had been happening.

  ‘And how,’ I asked, as we turned right at the island at the end of the dual carriageway, ‘can you disguise something really important in a set of notes on computerising the hire of videos?’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  �
��No. But it’s the only theory I’ve got.’

  Up to the College of Food and a left down Great Charles Street. And he was studying the rear-view mirror with far more than casual interest.

  ‘Company?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Don’t worry if it’s the police – all we’d –’

  ‘I’m not worrying about the police – not unless they drive old Datsuns.’

  ‘Not brown?’

  ‘In one, Sophie. In one.’

  He’d accelerated, but carried on talking as if doing forty round an island were an everyday event. The back end wanted to break away – I could feel him fighting for control.

  ‘Bloody diesel on the road,’ he said, heading back up Great Charles Street. Then he took us under the first of the Queensway tunnels. ‘Funny, Sophie, when I was a kid – twelve, I’d be – they tried it on a bit at school. Asked me why all Pakis drove Datsuns. I didn’t know what a Paki was, let alone a Datsun. But it’s true, you know. Ninety per cent of the cars in our street are bloody Datsuns. Mostly brown Datsuns. But I don’t reckon that one’s one of my neighbours’.’

  We were through the last of the underpasses now, heading briskly down Bristol Street. So was the Datsun.

  We crossed the lights at the big McDonald’s just as they changed to red. We could hear the squeal of tyres as the Datsun wove under the wheels of a lorry with right of way.

  Priory Road lights, next. If he turned left there was Edgbaston cricket ground and Moseley. But he was surely turning right – and then, slewing from one lane to the other, he finally took us straight on: after a short narrower section, a long dual carriageway which led towards Selly Oak.